Wagner Ware marks

How to read it

The Shelby County Historical Society in Sidney says the business began as a partnership among Mathias Wagner’s sons in the early 1880s and was incorporated in 1891, with Bernard, Milton, Louis and William Wagner as its main owners. They decided that every product would be cast with the name of their town on the back, and an early advertisement promised that the name Wagner was cast on the bottom of each piece. The company’s 1924 catalogue dates its polished cast-iron ware to 1891 and its nickel-plated ware to 1892, and gives its cable address as Wagner Ware, Sidney, Ohio. Wagner Cast Iron, which reissues the old designs, says the company introduced its stylized Wagner Ware logo with a looped W in 1915, when many competitors did not mark their products at all.

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Sidney on the base

The town on Wagner’s pieces is Sidney, in Shelby County, Ohio. Wagner was not the only hollow-ware foundry there: the historical society records that Philip Smith founded the Sidney Hollow Ware Co. in 1886 and that Wagner bought it in 1897. Wagner Cast Iron says the foundry was sold back to Smith in 1905; the Cast Iron Collector gives 1903.

Owners after the Wagner family

Wagner Cast Iron’s history gives the sequence: the family sold the company to the Randall Company of Cincinnati in 1952; Textron bought Randall in 1959 and sold the line as “Randall Made Wagner Ware”; General Housewares bought it in 1969 and in 1987 stopped using the Wagner Ware trademark for a new line called Wagner’s 1891 Original. The Sidney plant closed for a scheduled break in July 1999 and did not reopen. The historical society’s article, written in January 1998, still called Wagner the oldest continuously operating cookware maker in the country. Randall also bought Griswold, so the two names were sold together for decades; see Griswold.

Other Wagner names

The Cast Iron Collector lists Wagner brand names besides Wagner Ware: National, Long Life, Magnalite, Wardway and Ward’s Cast Iron. Magnalite, cast aluminum ware, was introduced in 1934. The historical society credits Wagner with pioneering cast-aluminum cookware in 1894.

Who owns the mark

The Cast Iron Collector says a bank sold the Wagner and Griswold trademark rights to American Culinary Corp. of Willoughby, Ohio, in 2000. WAGNER WARE is now registered, on the Supplemental Register since June 2023, to Voyager Brands LLC of Philadelphia, for pots, pans, skillets, griddles and grill pans, with first use in April 2022.